Space Future has been on something of a hiatus of late. With the concept of Space Tourism steadily increasing in acceptance, and the advances of commercial space, much of our purpose could be said to be achieved. But this industry is still nascent, and there's much to do. So...watch this space.

China, a country with over 4500 years of recorded history, gave the world, gunpowder, paper, compasses, movable type, and even the seismological detector. Now China has one more bullet point to its list of achievements: It’s the third country to have docked two spacecraft in orbit.

Space is a dirty place. Over 16,000 pieces of debris over 10 cm wide have been left behind since Sputnik took to the skies in 1957. And now the Swiss want to do something about it. Scientists with the Swiss Space Center at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, are developing a “janitor” satellite, known as CleanSpace One, to make space tidier.

With
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo in flight testing and XCOR and Blue Origin well along in developing their vehicles, suborbital space tourism is about to become a reality…but that reality will belong only to the wealthy for the next couple of decades.

Satellite and missile defense manufacturer Orbital Sciences is about slicing off a piece of that space tourism pie: Orbital announced, via Twitter, its second entry into the commercial crew and cargo delivery business with a private space plane called Prometheus.

As reported here a few days ago, Russia has announced its plans adding another Soyuz craft to its fleet dedicated to and taking two paying passengers along with a professional astronaut pilot as early as 2013.

In a press release dated 9/27/10, Russia’s space agency Roscosmos announced its plans to allow two space tourists to ride its Soyuz craft along with a professional cosmonaut as pilot. “Such a proposal is under consideration of Roscosmos and the American Space Adventures (company)” said Alexei Krasnov, head of Roscosmos’ manned flights department. “There are also detailed offers which we will study in Washington at a meeting of space agencies’ heads,” he said.